Last Night of 12 Soviet Generals Who Joined Hitler: Moscow 1946

22 June 1941, the Soviet Union. Without a declaration of war, German forces cross the Soviet border along a front  stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians, destroying entire armies in weeks and taking  millions of prisoners. For most Soviet soldiers who fall into German hands, captivity means a  slow death: men are held in open fields without shelter or food, dying in their hundreds of  thousands from starvation, disease and exposure.

It is under these conditions that collaboration  begins to emerge. Some prisoners conclude that cooperation with the enemy offers the only  alternative to dying in a German camp. Others hate Stalin’s regime enough to take up arms  against it. Many are driven by a mixture of both. In the summer of 1942, German  officers searching for a senior Soviet figure capable of leading  a Russian anti-Stalinist movement believe they have found the ideal  candidate.

 His name is Andrey Vlasov, and the army he will build from the ruins of  German captivity is the Russian Liberation Army. Andrey Vlasov had once been one of Stalin’s most  celebrated officers and was widely regarded as one of the heroes of the defence of Moscow. In  July 1942, however, the Germans captured him on the Volkhov Front, where his 2nd Shock Army had  been encircled, left without supplies or support, and ultimately destroyed.

 Vlasov had been  offered evacuation by aircraft but refused, choosing instead to remain with his men  until a local farmer eventually handed him over to the Germans. In captivity he met  German army officers who had long sought a senior Soviet military figure willing to  front a Russian anti-Stalinist movement, and within weeks Vlasov had agreed to become  that figure.

 Whether conviction or calculation drove the decision has never been fully resolved  but it is possible that as an intelligent man he knew that Soviet officers captured by the enemy  were regarded by Stalin as criminals deserving the death penalty. Vlasov himself realized that  even if he were to escape from German captivity, he would certainly not be able to return to  the Soviet Union while Stalin was still alive.

The founding document of the Vlasov movement was  the Smolensk Declaration which was created in December 1942. It promised the Russian people and  other nations of the Soviet Union the abolition of collective farms, freedom of religion and  speech, the right to private property, and government without Bolshevik terror.

 Yet for the  next two years, the Russian Liberation Army, also known as the ROA or the Vlasov army, proclaimed in  the declaration remained little more than a name on paper, because Adolf Hitler was unwilling to  allow the formation of an autonomous Russian unit. Hitler regarded Slavs as subhuman, and refused  to arm Russian volunteers under Russian command, viewing the entire project as a potential  threat to German control of the occupied east.

Vlasov was in Berlin, where he cooperated with  Nazi propaganda, but his activities for a long time were reduced to drafting manifestos for  formations that would not be authorised until 1944, when Germany’s military position had become  desperate enough to create units of the Russian Liberation Army.

 Even then, only two divisions  were sanctioned, and equipment and supplies arrived slowly and incompletely. The formal  ceremony establishing the movement’s political body, the Committee for the Liberation of the  Peoples of Russia, took place on 14 November 1944 in Prague, where Vlasov read aloud a manifesto  committing the movement to fourteen principles including freedom of religion, abolition of  collective farms, and equality before the law.

German pressure to include anti-Semitic language  was successfully resisted by Vlasov’s committee, but they were obliged to include a  statement criticising the Western Allies, labelling them “plutocracies” that were  “allies of Stalin in his conquest of Europe”. The men who gathered around Vlasov came from  across the wreckage of the Soviet officer corps, captured at different moments of the Second World  War and drawn into the movement by different combinations of conviction and desperation which  was also caused by the appalling conditions faced

by Soviet prisoners of war in German camps, where  millions of them died of malnutrition, disease and exposure or were beaten to death by German guards. Sergei Bunyachenko became the most important military figure in the movement below  Vlasov himself. He had been captured by Romanian forces in December 1942 and by late 1944  commanded the ROA’s 1st Division also known as, the 600th (Russian) Infantry Division the only  formation the Vlasov army ever brought to full operational readiness. The division began forming  on 1 December 1944 in the town of Münsingen in

south-western Germany, drawing its initial nucleus  partly from the remnants of the Kaminski Brigade, a Soviet collaborationist formation notorious  for atrocities in Byelorussia and Warsaw, whose former members Bunyachenko accepted  reluctantly and in limited numbers. Allegedly when the rabble of the Kaminski brigade arrived  at the camp where the division was being formed, gangs of armed and unarmed men in all kinds of  uniforms, accompanied by women in gaudy dresses, spilled out of the railway carriages. At the  sight of them, Bunyachenko exclaimed in anger:

“So this is what you’re giving me – bandits,  robbers, thieves. You’ll let me have what you can no longer use!” Despite problems  with this unit and chronic shortages of equipment, the division reached combat  strength by the end of February 1945. The ROA’s first engagement came in February 1945,  when a small unit, around 50 men, led by Igor Konstantinovich Sakharov attacked Soviet positions  on the eastern bank of the Oder River north of Frankfurt an der Oder. The assault achieved  limited initial success, capturing the villages of

Neulewin and Kerstenbruch, but in a German report,  Sakharov’s unit was said to demonstrate “high fighting qualities and outstanding courage,” and  Sakharov was awarded the Iron Cross for his role, although he had not personally been present  at the fighting due to having been ill. In mid-April 1945, Bunyachenko’s division went to  the Oder Front.

 The division attacked a heavily fortified Red Army bridgehead near Frankfurt  an der Oder, that German forces had previously failed to eliminate, going in without adequate  artillery or air support. After several days the outnumbered division was forced to retreat.  Bunyachenko withdrew on his own authority and informed the German command he would take no  further orders.

 A few days later, the division began marching towards the former Czechoslovak  frontier, together with other Russian volunteers, more than 20,000 men in total. On the way, the  Germans tried in vain to induce him to obey their orders. At the end of April, the division reached  the Czech lands where Vlasov himself joined it. The march brought the division to the  outskirts of Prague in early May 1945, as Czechoslovak resistance fighters launched an  uprising against the German occupation on 5 May.

The insurgents seized the radio station  and threw up barricades across the city. German forces responded with tanks, artillery,  and SS reinforcements. The Czech National Council sent representatives to Bunyachenko requesting  his intervention against German units. Vlasov was initially reluctant to agree that move but  ultimately did not resist General Bunyachenko’s decision to fight against the Germans.

 Soon the  division joined the fighting against the Nazis: they defended or captured key strongholds and  strategic points in Prague and took control of a large part of the city and its suburbs.  Their intervention helped liberate much of the left bank of the Vltava River. They even  surrounded Ruzyně Airport, but German forces managed to break out of the encirclement, and the  ROA units encountered only the German rear guard.

ROA units joined Czech fighters also on the  barricades in the city. The division’s artillery and anti-tank weapons proved decisive in fighting  against German units, but also took its price. Around 300 ROA soldiers were killed during  the Prague Uprising. Czech civilians, except communists who saw them as traitors of their  own country, greeted Vlasov’s men as liberators.

The relief was short-lived. Bunyachenko learned  that Prague would be occupied by the Soviet Red Army, not the Americans. On the morning of 8 May  the division marched out westward in an attempt to avoid the advancing units of the Red Army One day later, large numbers of Soviet troops entered Prague.

 Alongside them came members  of the NKVD secret police and the SMERSH military counterintelligence service. Almost  immediately, arrests of ROA members began, as Soviet authorities regarded them as  traitors and enemies of the Soviet Union. Bunyachenko had managed to withdraw many  lightly wounded soldiers from Prague, but seriously wounded ROA troops lying in Prague  hospitals were left behind.

 The NKVD and SMERSH personnel dragged many of them from their beds,  beat them to death, and threw their bodies into an unmarked pit at Prague’s Olšany Cemetery. It is estimated that approximately 198 wounded ROA members were murdered in this manner. One  group of ROA soldiers, which was unable to flee Prague ahead of the Red Army, was shot by Russian  soldiers in Prague-Jinonice.

 Their bodies remain buried in an unmarked spot in a field to this day. Days later the ROA men laid down their arms in the village of Schlüsselburg now Lnáře in the Czech  Republic, apparently within the American zone, only to be informed on 12 May that Schlüsselburg  would fall within the Soviet zone and that the local American commander would not permit the  whole division to cross the new demarcation line.

Bunyachenko disbanded the formation and  advised his men to attempt the crossing individually. He was right in this decision  as almost all officers who were seized by Soviets were shot on the spot and soldiers  were punished by 25 years of forced labour. The men who were successful in crossing the  lines had hoped that surrender to the Americans would protect them from Soviet revenge,  and for a short time it seemed possible.

General George Patton, commanding the United  States Third Army, largely refused orders to repatriate Soviet citizens under his control.  But the Yalta Agreements, signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in February 1945,  required all Allied powers to repatriate Soviet citizens found on liberated territory,  and most Allied commanders eventually complied.

Just four days after the end of the  Second World War in Europe, on 12 May, Vlasov was being transported in the United States  Army convoy when Soviet troops stopped his vehicle and seized him. One by one, through the summer  of 1945, the ROA military leadership was brought to Moscow and delivered to Lubyanka prison.

 The investigation conducted by SMERSH produced thousands of pages of interrogation transcripts.  The court before which the case was heard was the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the  Soviet Union. This body adjudicated criminal cases of exceptional importance involving  the highest command of the army and navy, as well as individuals accused of treason and  counterrevolutionary activities.

 In practice, appeals against its judgments were not allowed  due to the secrecy surrounding the cases. The president of the military court at the time of  the trial in 1946 was Vasili Vasilievich Ulrikh, a military judge who had also presided over other  well-known trials in the Soviet Union. The planned death sentence for all the defendants was approved  by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party on 23 July 1946.

 The trial was held a few days after, from 30 July to 1 August 1946. On 1 August  all twelve defendants – including former generals and senior commanders of the ROA  units, including Vlasov and Bunyachenko were found guilty and condemned to death. The sentences were carried out the same day in Butyrka Prison in Moscow. All twelve  were hanged.

 The bodies were taken to the crematorium and their ashes poured into  the moat of the Donskoy Monastery, mixed into a mass grave already holding the remains of  thousands of other victims of Stalinist terror. Thanks for watching the World History  Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe and click the bell notification  icon so you don’t miss our next episodes. We thank you and we’ll  see you next time on the channel.